Slightly more is known about Thomas Proctor Howard. Born in Massachusetts, he joined the army in 1801. Early in the expedition, Clark made the curious comment that Howard ‘never Drinks water.’ Later, at Fort Mandan, Howard returned to the fort after dark and climbed over the wall rather than asking the guard to open the gate. An Indian followed Howard’s lead and climbed over the wall himself, much to Lewis’s dismay. He promptly ordered a court-martial for Howard, ‘an old soldier’ who should have known better. In the last court-martial of the expedition, the court found Howard guilty of ‘[s]etting a pernicious example to the Savages,’ but suspended the penalty of 50 lashes. Howard married Genevieve Roy after the expedition, and they had two sons. He served again in the army and was 37 when he died in 1816. Although Howard’s property was valued at only $293, Genevieve was entangled in legal proceedings over the estate for the next decade. Howard’s son Joseph went west with a trapping party under William Ashley in 1827.

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On September 23, 1808, the honorable John Lucas tapped his gavel to begin a murder trial. George Shannon sat in the jury box with 11 other men. As the accused was brought in, he must have acknowledged Shannon, for he was a man Shannon knew well — George Drouillard, Lewis’s right-hand man on the journey, a hunter, scout, and interpreter par excellence. The year after the expedition, during a fur-trading excursion where military rules of conduct were strictly enforced, a man named Antoine Bissonnette took the equipment issued him and deserted. Manuel Lisa ordered Drouillard and two others ‘to go and bring him dead or alive.’ Drouillard returned half an hour later with the wounded Bissonnette. Lisa sent Bissonnette to St. Charles for medical help, but he died on the way.

Though Drouillard’s actions are shocking by today’s standards, Shannon and his fellow jurors considered them justifiable. They retired for 15 minutes before returning a verdict of not guilty. Drouillard had been exonerated, but Bissonnette’s death haunted him for the rest of his life. ‘This has not been done through malice, hatred or any evil intent,’ a remorseful Drouillard wrote to his sister. ‘Thoughtlessness on my part and lack of reflection…is the only cause of it, and moreover encouraged and urged by my partner, Manuel Lisa, who we ought to consider in this affair as guilty as myself for without him the thing would never have taken place. The recollection of this unhappy affair throws me very often in the most profound reflections.’

Court records show that Drouillard was frequently involved in legal battles related to the fur trade. He must have headed up the Missouri with a sense of relief when he joined another trading party in the spring of 1809. A few months later, at Fort Mandan, Drouillard met Colter, who had still not returned to civilization. In the spring of the next year, Drouillard and Colter guided fur trader Pierre Menard and 80 trappers to Three Forks, where Menard hoped to establish a permanent post for the St. Louis Missouri Fur Company.

One week after the men began building a fort, a band of Blackfeet ambushed 18 trappers, slaying and mutilating two of them and stealing horses, traps, and furs. Three other men were missing, but Colter was among those who made it back to camp. ‘He came into the fort and said he had promised his Maker to leave the country,’ wrote a witness. ‘And ‘now’ said he, throwing down his hat on the ground, ‘if God will only forgive me this time and let me off I will leave the country day after tomorrow, and be damned if I ever come into it again’.’ True to his word, Colter, who had spent six consecutive years in the wild, departed two days later and never returned — but he had to escape another Blackfeet attack on the way.

Unmoved by Colter’s resolve, Drouillard continued trapping. ‘I am too much of an Indian to be caught by Indians,’ boasted Drouillard, who had been born to a French father and a Pawnee mother. A month after Colter’s departure, Drouillard had grown bold enough to trap on his own, returning with beaver pelts two days in a row. ‘This is the way to catch beaver,’ he said. On the third morning he ignored warnings and left alone again. Later that day, a group of armed men rode upstream and found a scene of carnage. One of them recalled that Drouillard ‘and his horse lay dead, the former mangled in a horrible manner; his head was cut off, his entrails torn out, and his body hacked to pieces. We saw from the marks on the ground that he must have fought in a circle on horseback and probably killed some of his enemies, being a brave man and well armed with a rifle, pistol, knife, and tomahawk.’ Drouillard was 36, unmarried, and childless.

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